09 mai 2008
HI-MEMS (Hybrid Insect MEMS)
posted: 04 February 2008 10:00 am ET
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redditCornell University researchers have succeeded in implanting electronic circuit probes into tobacco hornworms as early pupae. The hornworms pass through the chrysalis stage to mature into long-lived moths whose muscles can be controlled with the implanted electronics. The research was showcased at MEMS 2008, an international academic conference on Micro-Electrico-Mechanical Systems that took place from January 13-17 in Tucson, AZ.
The pupae insertion state was found to yield the best results. The resulting moth, a microsystem-controlled insect, has a circuit board protruding from the top of its midsection. Probes are inserted into the dorsoventral and dorsolongitudinal flight muscles. CT images show components of high absorbance indicating tissue growth around the probe.
The research also indicated the most favorable and least favorable times for insertion of control devices. The overall size of the circuit board is just 8x7mm, with a total weight of about 500 mg. The capacity of the battery is 16 mAh, and weighs 240 mg.
A driving voltage of 5 volts causes the tobacco hornworm blade muscles (two pairs) to move for flight and maneuvering.
The insect cyborgs are part of a program called HI-MEMS (Hybrid Insect MEMS), a DARPA program initiated by Program Manager Dr. Amit Lal. The ultimate goal of the HI-MEMS program is to provide insect cyborgs that can demonstrate controlled flight; the insects would be used in a variety of military and homeland security applications.
HI-MEMS program director Amit Lal credits science fiction writer Thomas Easton with the idea. Lal read Easton's 1990 novel Sparrowhawk, in which animals enlarged by genetic engineering (called Roachsters) were outfitted with implanted control systems.
Dr. Easton, a professor of science at Thomas College, sees a number of applications for HI-MEMS insects.
Moths are extraordinarily sensitive to sex attractants, so instead of giving bank robbers money treated with dye, they could use sex attractants instead. Then, a moth-based HI-MEMS could find the robber by following the scent."
"[Also,] with genetic engineering Darpa could replace the sex attractant receptor on the moth antennae with receptors for other things, like explosives, drugs or toxins," said Easton.
DARPA had better be careful with its insect army; in Easton's novel, hackers are able to gain control of genetically engineered animals by hacking the controller chips used in their implanted control structures.
If you are interested in one dark-side view of how this kind of invention could be used by corporations for advertising, see the madcap blurbflies from Jeff Noon's excellent 2000 sf novel Nymphomation.
Learn more about Hybrid Insect MEMS Sought By DARPA. Via Robot Watch.
(This Science Fiction in the News story used with permission of Technovelgy.com - where science meets fiction
Hervé Szydlowski
Hervé SZYDLOWSKI, Vers une post-beauté
http://cyberkor100org.canalblog.com/
Hervé Szydlowski, S duTriptyque "S O I n°6, 2006,
tirages papiers mat pur coton,
série 100x100cm et série 50x50cm.
Je l'ai attendu, il est venu, le photographe qui a su faire du hors-norme une beauté classique. Hervé Szydlowski photographie tous les corps : les jeunes, les vieux, les gros, les minces, il n'y a aucun critère physique exigé, tout le monde est susceptible d'être représenté sur ses images, du plus parfait ou moins avantagé. Pourtant, pas de politique en faveur du hors-norme, pas de militantisme pro-gros ou pro-vieux, pas de dictature néo-antique non plus, juste la cristallisation d'un corps toujours plein de potentiel et encore rempli de promesses quelque soit sa forme et son âge, qu'il soit "bien formé", flasque ou au bord de la ruine... Szydlowski s'intéresse à la ligne du corps, ce jeu de trait/caractère qui peut être droit, courbe, anguleux ou onduleux, cette intérêt de la chair/contour nous est révélé dans les dessins de l'artiste. Seulement, les lignes présentés dans les dessins ne sont pas exactement le contour réaliste de la chair, elle révèle l'intensité du corps, un caractère invisible de l'être. Cependant, ces dessins nous permettent d'avoir un autre regard sur le réalisme des photographies, une autre lecture du corps cru. C'est cela la post-beauté : montrer l'éclat des corps (invisible?) que nous interdit de voir la publicité militante d'occident (pro-jeune et pro-mince), par cette réflexion sur les lignes expressives.
Hervé Szydlowski, Vêtu de nu II, photo 4, Montalivet, 2005
Gros ou mince, jeune ou vieux, petit ou grand, le corps est rempli de lignes, que ce soit les os ou la graisse qui conditionnent leurs structures, ce sont ces cernés noirs laissés par les plis de la chair - au creux des os et des muscles, dans les nervures d'une peau fripée ou dans les fentes créées par la graisse - qui architecturent l'expressivité d'un nu. Chez Hervé Szydlowski, les lumières viennent mettre ces traits de l'anatomie en valeur, alors on comprend que cet expressivité des lignes sur le corps est le commun des mortels. La post-beauté est donc universelle, applicable à tous, elle constitue un potentiel anti-discriminatoire intéressant. Le corps, même photographié, devient alors un dessin, un hiéroglyphe qui codifie le sens caché d'une beauté nouvelle, un langage anatomique étonnant et inattendu. Voilà donc une œuvre pleine de charme et "tout public". Elle n'est ni choquante, ni légère, ni entre les deux, elle est différente, sa force réside dans cette réflexion classique, mais post-humaniste, sur l'humain, son anatomie, sa matière et les lignes qui la compose.
Hervé Szydlowski, Vêtu de nu, photo 7, Montalivet, 2004
Lien vers le site d'Hervé Szydlowski
Body mutation
MAKING MUTATIONS: OBJECTS, PRACTICES, CONTEXTS
CALL FOR PAPERS
MAKING MUTATIONS: OBJECTS, PRACTICES, CONTEXTS
Cultural History of Heredity Workshop
at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
13-15 January 2009
This workshop aims to investigate mutation as a relatively unexplored phenomenon of interest in the history of biology. Analytical approaches to be employed may include the study of mutations as objects (mutants), as technical and social practices (mutagenesis, models, and networks), and in their many varied political and cultural contexts, from the dawn of genetics through the atomic era.
Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 June 2008.
Abstract
Throughout the twentieth century, mutations have been at the heart of the sciences of heredity—from the publication of Hugo de Vries’ Die Mutationstheorie in 1901 to the rise of classical genetics, theoretical population genetics, molecular biology and beyond. Although mutations have played central roles in the emergence of each of these fields, they have been generally overshadowed by an overwhelming popular and scholarly attention to the related concept of the gene. Recent scholarship has reminded us, however, that genetics was understood and practiced in widely different ways among different communities of practitioners, not all of whom were primarily concerned with the gene itself, but many of whom engaged with the study and production of mutants and mutation at various levels and contexts—in the field, the laboratory, and elsewhere.
From ever-transmuting concepts of mutation and shifts in discourse to novel practices in the field and laboratory, to the distribution and regulation of mutagens and broad-scale governmental involvement, mutation thus seems a particularly fruitful way to explore how the study of heredity in the organism and heredity in society intertwined, from Die Mutationstheorie until the dawn of biotech. Engaging with mutations as our focus of study—rather than genes in general—thus opens up new vistas for exploration as well as new approaches to otherwise familiar material.
Objects
The place of mutants in the history of genetics has been thus far underestimated. Time and again geneticists used mutants to understand heredity: the mutant was that which violated the established order, the unexpected surprising element that was both anathema to conceptual order and yet central to experimental practices producing that order. At first unpredictable in their occurrence and form, attempts were repeatedly made in the first half of the twentieth century to induce mutants at will, to control evolution, and to harness its power for human ends—with distinctly mixed results. Mutants often remained surprising and were sometimes dangerous, as were frequently the techniques used to produce them. Wily epistemic things, mutants provided always new, and yet always familiar, ways for heredity to jump out again as an unrestrained, unsolved phenomenon. Understanding mutants as objects can help us begin to more fully explore their central role in the
history of biology of this period.
Practices
Mutants—and mutations more generally—proliferated throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Understanding the production, amplification, and domestication of mutation in this period entails close study of the varied manners and contexts of practice: from operative concepts and interpretations of mutation to specific techniques and moral economies. Engaging with mutants embedded in such practices can perhaps help us to begin to unpack the relationships between “mutants” and “mutations” and those who dealt with them—and with each other.
In the study of transmission heredity, for example, the induction of mutations often entailed a mode of inquiry that included altering the environment partly by means of new tools: radium, X-rays, and chemicals. Such new tools existed in complex relationships with practices of characterizing and enumerating mutation: what was a mutation? How could one detect its occurrence? Moreover, the use of such mutation-inducing tools also points directly to relations with larger society: the use of radiation and chemical compounds is inextricable from broader processes of medicalization and industrialization in the first half of the twentieth century. The study of mutation as both object and practice thus also requires paying close attention to the ways in which social institutions, agricultural imperatives, eugenical concerns, clinical hopes, and industrial relations all aligned in particular configurations at particular junctures in time.
Contexts and Connections
No longer merely a nodal point in a network of small-scale specialist communities and practices, mutation thus came to embrace a variety of larger social concerns in times of world-historical change, from eugenical worries and matters of social welfare to the development of novel forms of risk assessment able to face a brave new mutagenic world. As the role of state governments proved central to the regulation of toxic mutagens, mutations were inherently part of a broader biopolitics, a situation that became ever more true with the dawning of the atomic age, fears of radioactive fall-out, the emergence of concepts of “genetic load,” and the far-reaching environmental policies of the nineteen-sixties. By mid-century, the environment was no longer merely a tool or a resource for the scientific study of mutation. Rather, broader social and industrial processes that made such novel mutagens available in the first place had turned the environment into an
arena of urgent social alarm. But biopolitics operated at more conceptual and simultaneously explicitly “political” dimensions as well: in altering the hereditary substance by changing environmental conditions, for example, the use of mutagens placed dimensions of genetics in a complicated position with respect to questions of Lamarckism and challenges from Lysenkoism. Such macroscale dimensions of the history of mutation also are in need of their histories.
Topics and Questions
Exploring the ways in which using mutation as an analytical lens can move us from the laboratory to the world and back again is our goal. What new narratives in the history of classical genetics, and of the interwoven texture of its scientific and social dimensions, can we uncover with mutation as our centerpiece? How can mutation as an analytical frame enrich our understanding of the cultural history of heredity?
Such new narratives to be developed might include the following topics:
• the development of powerful new research traditions (such as “Oenotheory”)
• early attempts to induce mutation and to design synthetic new species and to control evolution for human purposes
• discerning biological levels of mutation and varieties of mutagens
• addressing shifting and plural meanings of mutation in science, politics, and popular culture
• exploring mutations as processes/tools
• examining mutants as products/model organisms (e.g., Drosophila, jimsonweed, phage, humans)
• situating mutants as nodal points in networks of practices, moral economies, and institutions
• comparing different national and transnational contexts of mutation research
Abstracts (500 words) and contact information should be sent to Luis Campos at lcampos@drew.edu by 15 June 2008.
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Boltzmannstraße 22
14195 Berlin
We envision being able to respond to all proposals by July 2008. Travel and accommodation costs of speakers will be covered. Accepted participants should prepare to present for 25-30 minutes, and will be expected to provide a final draft of their work by 15 November 2008, in order to ensure commentators sufficient time for response.
For in-depth information relating to the project “A Cultural History of Heredity,” see
http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/workshops/en/HEREDITY/